6 ms·

Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business

151 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

alephnerd 9mo ago
I'm not sure I buy Arm's argument. It is hard to describe the degree to which policymakers in China [0][1], India [2][3][4], and South Korea [5] are all heavily promoting RISC-V in order to reduce vendor dependency as well as build their own competitive and domestic design ecosystems. Additionally, a significant portion of Arm's China, US, and India engineering and product leadership has left to work on RISC-V startups and companies now. That said, I can see Arm being leveraged by other Softbank owned companies like Ampere (which they already do) and Graphcore, with an eventual merger of all 3 into some form of a mega-corp due to operational overlaps and efficiencies, but this would be defensive in nature given the degree to which the industry has aligned with funding a RISC-V ecosystem and how RISC-V's governance and leadership consists of major players and leaders in the chip design space. --- Edit: Can't reply > It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like. That's why Qualcomm is also betting on RISC-V as well after acquiring Ventana [6] and is participating in India's DeepTech initiative [7], which has been targeting RISC-V startups as well as Renesas [8] in Japan+India taping out a 3nm RISC-V processor for automotive and IoT usecases. And also why FuriosaAI in SK has been working on RISC-V, as well as the multitude of fabless players in China. It's the same thing that happened with IBM POWER vs x86 decades ago with an added sovereignty component. --- Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty. I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry. Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank. --- [0] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260213PD208/arm-risc-v-competition-chips-market.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260213PD208/arm-risc-v-com... [1] - https://www.cas.cn/cm/202601/t20260126_5097208.shtml https://www.cas.cn/cm/202601/t20260126_5097208.shtml [2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260216VL205.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260216VL205.html [3] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2224839&reg=3&lang=2 https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2224839&... [4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1820621&reg=3&lang=2 https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1820621&re... [5] - https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806 https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806 [6] - https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acquires-ventana-micro-systems--deepening-risc-v-cpu-ex https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acqu... [7] - https://idtalliance.org/ https://idtalliance.org/ [8] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250923VL201/renesas-3nm-revenue-automotive-chip-2030.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250923VL201/renesas-3nm-re... [9] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovereign-ai-chip-design-industry-in-the-uk/council-for-science-and-technology-advice-on-building-a-sovereign-ai-chip-design-industry-in-the-uk https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovere... [10] - https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-malaysia-silicon-vision https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-malaysia-silicon-vision [11] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250918VL202/arm-design-chips-2nm-renesas.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250918VL202/arm-design-chi...
- 3eb7988a1663 9mo ago
  It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.
  - wmf 9mo ago
    Qualcomm was trying to cheat Arm out of license fees that Nuvia agreed to.
    - johntb86 9mo ago
      Qualcomm won in court, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
      - kernal 9mo ago
        Yes, ARM did lose the case, but I attribute that to an ignorant judge as the license wasn’t transferable to Qualcomm from Nuvia. Regardless, ARM will have their day when it comes time to license the next ARM architecture version.
        lugu 9mo ago
        Will they? What kind of breakthrough do you see coming that would convince large actors to make that switch?
        adrian_b 9mo ago
        Qualcomm also had their own architectural license, but Arm claimed that neither of the 2 licenses is applicable. I have read at that time the documents presented by both parties, but essential details of the contracts were missing from the public documents, so it was impossible to know which of Qualcomm and Arm was right. Nevertheless, the argumentation presented by Qualcomm seemed far more plausible, unless it would have been contradicted by some of the redacted out contract details. Arm has not shown in public any information that could have proven that they are right, so they, or their supporters, may not say that the judge has made a wrong decision. Supposing that the decision was wrong, Arm has preferred to keep secret their arrangements with the customers, instead of proving that they were right, presumably because they might lose more money if other customers learned the exact details of the contract with Qualcomm, so they could request similar terms. While I believe that it is right for Qualcomm to have won the trial, I strongly dislike the fact that Qualcomm now designs their own cores instead of licensing them from Arm. The reason is that the Arm cores have excellent documentation, on par with that of the Intel-AMD CPUs, while the Qualcomm cores, like the Apple cores, have non-existent documentation. Moreover, Qualcomm is so silly that they have always obfuscated even what Arm cores they used in their older products. Whenever I evaluated some smartphone with Qualcomm SoC it was impossible to find any useful information on the Qualcomm site, but I had to go to various third parties to learn what is actually inside the Qualcomm SoC, to be able to compare it with alternatives.
djfergus 9mo ago
https://archive.is/wrKvv https://archive.is/wrKvv
Nevermark 9mo ago
I am curious how AMD sees themselves staying relevant in the value chain as compute is increasingly about cpu cores working with npu cores. Not all ARM use cases need that, but it would be a huge mistake to not develop integrated options. And also an opportunity to make adjustments to their business model.
- wmf 9mo ago
  AMD has CPU, GPU, NPU, FPGA, NIC, DPU... They seem well positioned. The Arm ecosystem has everything you could want but Arm themselves are taking some time to create their in-house CPU and TPU.
  - Nevermark 9mo ago
    That's good news. A system for customers (and themselves) to conveniently tightly mix and match all those computing modes is a great competitive/value move.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- hulitu 9mo ago
  ARM is an incompatible pile of mess. On an (X86) PC you can tranfer your disk, as it is, to a new X86 architecture and it will run. On ARM, every processor has its own bootloader, blobs needed for initialisation. Even the systems have different architecture. In the end, you need a special software setup, which is not supported more than a few years. See phones, Raspberry PIs and derivatives, Chromebooks.
  - ajxs 9mo ago
    > On an (X86) PC you can tranfer your disk, as it is, to a new X86 architecture and it will run. This is because of a supporting set of standards (BIOS/UEFI/ACPI) that are well-supported on x86 systems, but technically independent of the x86 ISA. BIOS, and the general compatibility you're talking about, is a historical artefact of the IBM PC being so dominant in the market that other companies created compatible computers. UEFI and ACPI actually exist in the ARM ecosystem now. If ARM continues to grow outside of mobile devices, you could eventually see the kind of broad compatibility you're talking about. It's not super likely though. All signs point to the consumer computing ecosystem becoming more closed, rather than more open.
intrasight 9mo ago
>Yet Arm’s current model captures only a sliver of the value it creates. No, they capture exactly the value they create. As a long time (40 years) subscriber to The Economist, I expect better of them.
- cyode 9mo ago
  Do you really think it’s equal or are you contesting the value creation/capture dichotomy writ large?
  - intrasight 9mo ago
    I think both Analogous to discussion 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994869#46995258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994869#46995258 We're fast approaching 1 trillion Arm CPUs manufactured - because it was a good design for a good price. No doubt unprecedented for something so complex to be produced in such volume. I predict that nothing else will ever achieve such scale.
    - OrvalWintermute 9mo ago
      The RISC-V growth is fairly spectacular; moving forward the CAGR is estimated at > 40%
- nerdsniper 9mo ago
  This feels like a religious belief. Somehow everyone captures exactly the value they create - no more, and no less. Amazing how perfect every transaction must be to ensure this is always true.
  - concinds 9mo ago
    "Capturing the value you create" is a euphemistic way to describe pushing producer surplus towards 100% and consumer surplus to 0%, your ability to pull it off depends on your monopoly power, and it would be more honestly described as "value extraction" than as "capturing". I think in this case semantics matter.
ggm 9mo ago
Porque no los dos? Keep on doing IPR focussed design. Grow deeper roots into a foundry, work on integration of the tech into FPGA and big chip/platter stuff for AI. If AI tanks, the work will find a value point. We all want more memory and more execution cycles per clock tick be they on one ALU or many. Lots of work to come in optical related areas. ARM has green fields to dig, beyond the instruction set.
- dingdongditchme 9mo ago
  What do you mean by "IPR focussed design"? IPR = Intellectial Property Rights? So they should keep making designs but not compete with their customers?
  - ggm 9mo ago
    Do both. It's not like other companies don't do the same, Microsoft sell surface as well as Windows. Samsung sell tech to Apple and compete with Apple.
jasoneckert 9mo ago
ARM's failed lawsuit with Qualcomm revealed these same ambitions, albeit in a much more negative light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475228 After following that drama, it's difficult to see ARM as anything but a greedy profiteer.
- wyldfire 9mo ago
  Maybe they're greedy or maybe they see the long game is that their architecture licensing business is in serious jeopardy from RISCV. So, if you can't beat em, join em. Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too.
  - nxobject 9mo ago
    > Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too. I am not a deeply technical embedded person, but I actually don't think that would be the death of ARM: my understanding is that they develop a lot of SoC-level interconnect/fabric standards and IP as well. After all, you have to do a lot of work to integrate your ARM cores into an actual platform...
    - LeFantome 9mo ago
      The problem is they go from being at the center of everything outside x86-64 to just another RISC-V provider. And there will be dozens. And the market will not care so much as they succeed and fail as the ecosystem will not depend on the suppliers specifically. How does ARM stay at the top of that dog fight? It is a much bigger challenge than they have faced so far.
  - LeFantome 9mo ago
    The problem for ARM is that there are a dozen RISC-V companies implementing their business model. You license ARM cores because you want a “custom” chip but do not want to start from scratch. You especially do not want to have to bootstrap a software ecosystem. When ARM had no competition, it is just a question of which ARM core you want. Now, you can get the same thing from any RISC-V design house. Which means having real choice over the features you want. If ARM is just one of those RISC-V shops, how does ARM compete? By being the best? Not likely. And, in the past, you could not totally outgrow ARM as they own the ISA. The Qualcomm lawsuit was an attempt to maintain tight control over this. With RISC-V, you can pack up and move your whole ecosystem elsewhere including taking it entirely in-house. This includes the ISA to an extent since anybody can add extensions. Today, we are seeing RISC-V succeed where this flexibility matters most: in microcontrollers and in AI. But as performance equalizes, volumes go up and costs come down, the use cases where ARM makes more sense dwindle. That makes backwards compatibility the last real reason to use ARM. But does this matter on mobile where devices download the apps that match their arch? Not really. Does it matter in most embedded cases? Not really. Does it even matter in the server? More, but even there not as much as it used to. Does it matter for anything mostly GPU or NPU driven? No. So that leaves desktop and laptop. And, outside of Apple, ARM has not really built up anything to stay compatible with. RISC-V may have time to grow into that niche before being blocked. We are going to exit 2026 with RISC-V chips that are fast enough. How fast will the costs come down? Perhaps a year or two? What markets is ARM well positioned to continue its dominance in?
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
umairnadeem123 9mo ago
[dead]
kernal 9mo ago
If ARM wanted a bigger cut then they should have been fabricating their designs years ago instead of licensing their IP. They would have owned the Android SoC market.
cududa 9mo ago
Good. It’s always insane to me that they get 1% of the iPhone CPU cost of ~$68 or something there around. There was a lawsuit in 2020 or 2021 where some evidence was unsealed showing ARM gets 1% of the CPU cost. I can’t recall how that CPU cost was calculated - but I believe that was a part of their deal through the early 30’s. That’s less than a dollar per iPhone.
- faragon 9mo ago
  It's "fair": ARM takes 1% of the iPhone CPU, i.e., less than 0.1% of the total phone price, while Apple takes 30% of the apps in the iStore
  - hollerith 9mo ago
    --and about 50% of the total price of an iPhone.
    - vlovich123 9mo ago
      Yeah it’s like people don’t understand the concept of value addition. An ARM CPU by itself is worth less than what it is with the software, app ecosystem, dual sided market place Apple has built. While I think a 30% mark up is a tad expensive, it’s not hugely out of line with what retail store fronts generally charge to begin with. You can argue that virtual store fronts don’t have the same overheads, but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses.
      - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
        > but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses. are there any estimates on how much apple is costed in server costs because of apple app store and if there are, can that be considered with the 30% that they are leeching and compare the two of them and compare that estimate with the retail example you brought. So there are 2 million apps in app store. Assume average to be 100 MB so that is 2 million * 100 /(1024* 1024) = 190.734863 TB using $0.015 / GB-month Cf r2 with 0 egress costs I get the price as 2929.6128$ per month or 3 Grand/month ie. 36 Grand an year Heck, consider the average app size to be FOUR times the cost. Then you get the salary of 1 apple engineer and that's STILL less than the average salary of 1 apple engineer. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Engineer-Salaries-E1138_D_KO6,14.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Engineer-Salaries-E11... And we are forgetting the 99$ something which apple app devs have to pay iirc at sometimes. I am an android guy and actually android has similar number of apps so the estimate is same actually. But I would assume that the engineers aren't the bottleneck either. I assume that both apple/android stores aren't so complex to build to deserve 30% of transaction. Some might be interesting about the malware/static-analysis but there was this hn post made recently about instagram blackhole which uncovered an malicious apple app which was available in app store so :/ The only reason one might think so is maybe considering the development cost of apple but I think that is an hardware decision and when we buy apple devices, it should be used to recoup the costs not trying to cash cow either. Its a trillion $ company trying to extract 3$ from a 10$ transaction you might do to anybody's patreon from the app :/ Yeah. TLDR: No. I don't think a 30% transaction is justified. Hope this helps.
OrvalWintermute 9mo ago
RISC-V could completely eat ARM for lunch if they try to jack up fees under the guise of "value extraction", and not through true value creation. In 2 years from this date, I fully expect the safety critical RISC-V chips like the forthcoming High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) from Microchip, Inc.[0], and derivatives [1] [2] leveraging SiFive IP[3], and other RISC-V competitors [4] to take a dominant position in Space, Aerospace, Aviation, and potentially other less cost-sensitive industries where RTOS dominate. This raises a few questions in my mind: Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases? Will we see more derivatives with even higher performance beyond the already announced PolarFire2 designed specifically for terrestrial use? I don't know how sensitive their overall BOMs are to high priced reliable chips designed for fault tolerance... I don't know how fast the quality of the mass market chinese RISC-V chips will ascend the perceived quality gap, and expand offerings into newer profiles [5] Where will the toolchain for RISC-V be on a specific chip basis? Is Nvidia likely to expand their usage of RISC-V? [0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64-hpsc https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... [1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64hx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... [2] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64gx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... [3] https://www.sifive.com/ https://www.sifive.com/ [4] https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765 https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765 [5] https://docs.riscv.org/reference/profiles/rva23/_attachments/rva23-profile.pdf https://docs.riscv.org/reference/profiles/rva23/_attachments...
- alephnerd 9mo ago
  > In 2 years from this date, I fully expect the safety critical RISC-V chips like the forthcoming High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) from Microchip, Inc.[0], and derivatives [1] [2] leveraging SiFive IP[3], and other RISC-V competitors [4] to take a dominant position in Space, Aerospace, Aviation, and potentially other less cost-sensitive industries where RTOS dominate They already are in India [0][1], but SiFive helped build a portion of the ecosystem in India as well [2]. I'm sure there are similar applications in China but I'd need help pointing to a specific initiative. I know Tenstorrent is hitching their wagon to China especially after poaching Arm China leadership. > Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases They already are in India [3][4][8] - this is something the US and Indian governments as well as American and Indian VCs and corporations are collaborating on together. One such collaboration has already IPOed [5], seen combat, and begun helping develop capacity within America [6]. And another has recently announced a mega-raise with General Catalyst [7]. RISC-V design is on the roadmap as well in this relationship. [0] - https://www.iitm.ac.in/happenings/press-releases-and-coverages/iit-madras-isro-jointly-developed-and-successfully-booted https://www.iitm.ac.in/happenings/press-releases-and-coverag... [1] - https://www.isro.gov.in/vikram3201.html https://www.isro.gov.in/vikram3201.html [2] - https://www.sifive.com/blog/sifive-expands-presence-in-india-to-keep-up-with-the https://www.sifive.com/blog/sifive-expands-presence-in-india... [3] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260209VL216/risc-v-automotive-commercial-adoption-industrial.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260209VL216/risc-v-automot... [4] - https://www.mindgrovetech.in/s2401-secure-iot https://www.mindgrovetech.in/s2401-secure-iot [5] - https://www.qualcommventures.com/insights/blog/ideaforge-from-iit-bombay-to-ipo/ https://www.qualcommventures.com/insights/blog/ideaforge-fro... [6] - https://firstbreach.com/news/first-breach-signs-jv-with-ideaforge-ranked-third-globally-to-manufacture-and-distribute-drones-in-the-u-s/ https://firstbreach.com/news/first-breach-signs-jv-with-idea... [7] - https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-investment-in-raphe-mphibr https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-investment-in-ra... [8] - https://incoresemi.com/ https://incoresemi.com/
christkv 9mo ago
Arm has two main incomes. Licensing the ISA of the processor (low value) and licensing pre designed cores (high value).
aurareturn 9mo ago
Arm's biggest customers are also their biggest competitors. Apple and Qualcomm use their ISA license instead of their Core architecture license. ISA license pays a much smaller royalty fee. Now that Apple and Qualcomm both design their own custom cores, Arm's custom core license business is suffering. The only other company that license their custom cores for phones is Mediatek. Arm still has hyperscalers in Google, AWS, Microsoft, and Meta for server core licenses though. But that might not last as long since everyone wants to differentiate and design their own cores. Apple and Qualcomm are succeeding in designing better custom cores than original Arm cores. So Arm's business model has to change if they want to survive. Either they make ISA license fees much higher (risk losing customers to RISCV) or they make their own CPUs and compete against their own customers even more. I enjoy analyzing chip companies and businesses. I've never invested in Arm's stock because their customers are also their competitors. Ultimately, the questions for Arm investors are: 1. Do you believe they can design better cores than Apple and Qualcomm (and other big tech)? 2. Do you think that the threat of companies moving to RISC-V is real if Arm raises ISA royalties?
- RobotToaster 9mo ago
  Risc-v seems to be rapidly filling in their moat. Very little software on android is written in assembly, and binary translation seems to be solved anyway.
  - aurareturn 9mo ago
    Arguably, the LLM boom might be the best thing to happen to RISC-V. If software is cheap to produce, it'll be hardware cost that matter more. IE. Companies might say screw the royalty fees, we'll just ask an LLM to convert our software to run on RISC-V.
    - noodlesUK 9mo ago
      I think that for 95+% of companies that write software, it's not particularly sensitive to the ISA of the processor it's running on. Anyone who is writing code in a high level language like python or java doesn't care whether they're on x64, ARM or RISC-V. Compilers essentially already do this. There are specific situations (SIMD extensions, cryptography instructions, etc) where the differences sometimes get exposed, but it's pretty rare that this isn't abstracted away.
fifticon 9mo ago
traditionally, the chip goes on the shoulder, not the arm.
gzread 9mo ago
ARM almost made inroads on servers, then everyone switched back to x64. What happened?
- Lucasoato 9mo ago
  I regularly use Graviton CPUs on AWS (even if Amazon pays the cheaper ARM license), why would people switch back from that? It's effectively better in terms of performance/price, I expect these improvements to slowly but steadily reach the on-premises world as well.
  - gzread 9mo ago
    Yeah, but everything on AWS is already way more expensive than it should be, so the slight discount on ARM instances is a gimmick from Amazon to diversify their servers or something. Actual ARM servers aren't cheaper or better.
- justincormack 9mo ago
  The latest figures sugegsted that about 50% of server shipments into the clouds now are Arm.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
erelong 9mo ago
Hopefully RISC-V pulls ahead in coming years and gets an even bigger "slice"
- snvzz 9mo ago
  RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.
- NoiseBert69 9mo ago
  RISC-V is eating the "low power low performance"-niche alive right now. ARM-licensed microcontrollers (like STM32C0) cannot keep up with this price class. That's a huge business. Have a look at WCH. If you are used to the ST-HAL style you get that stuff running within a hour. They stuff works will fully opensourced compilers.
bacchusracine 9mo ago
Without Linux support, unlikely.
sylware 9mo ago
ARM should drop its ISAs and move to 'licensing' RISC-V implementations. IP-locked ISA is something nobody sane would want.
dingi 9mo ago
Not with this compatibility mess. I would trust ARM for a server/pc system, the day I can boot standard Debian Aarch64 image on them. Until then x86 it is.
- josemanuel 9mo ago
  https://www.minisforum.com/products/ms-r1 https://www.minisforum.com/products/ms-r1 Boots with uefi
kd913 9mo ago
ARM is a bloody financial hand grenade. 10% of the stock is floated. 90% of the stock is owned by Masa who used it for collateral for his 18 billion loan for Stargate. THat is against 33 banks who have a strong incentivise to dump in a margin call situation. Their revenues are circular for the last 4 years, with 30% growth purely coming from Softbank shuffling their own money. They are gonna be the canary in the coal mine for when the AI bubble implodes.
r4hamonrye 9mo ago
ARM .iso for x86-64 architecture renders this within compiling microcode in mockbuild before porting kernel tarball.

151 points by andsoitis 9mo ago

I'm not sure I buy Arm's argument. It is hard to describe the degree to which policymakers in China [0][1], India [2][3][4], and South Korea [5] are all heavily promoting RISC-V in order to reduce vendor dependency as well as build their own competitive and domestic design ecosystems. Additionally, a significant portion of Arm's China, US, and India engineering and product leadership has left to work on RISC-V startups and companies now. That said, I can see Arm being leveraged by other Softbank owned companies like Ampere (which they already do) and Graphcore, with an eventual merger of all 3 into some form of a mega-corp due to operational overlaps and efficiencies, but this would be defensive in nature given the degree to which the industry has aligned with funding a RISC-V ecosystem and how RISC-V's governance and leadership consists of major players and leaders in the chip design space. --- Edit: Can't reply > It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like. That's why Qualcomm is also betting on RISC-V as well after acquiring Ventana [6] and is participating in India's DeepTech initiative [7], which has been targeting RISC-V startups as well as Renesas [8] in Japan+India taping out a 3nm RISC-V processor for automotive and IoT usecases. And also why FuriosaAI in SK has been working on RISC-V, as well as the multitude of fabless players in China. It's the same thing that happened with IBM POWER vs x86 decades ago with an added sovereignty component. --- Edit 2: After thinking some more, I think a case could be made for Arm to survive but not thrive in the same manner as Minitel continued to kick around for so long due to France's stress on technological sovereignty. Long term, I think RISC-V will eat a large portion of Arm's commodity and embedded computing market share, but Arm (and moreso Softbank) is attempting to position itself as critical to British [9], Malaysian [10] (they remain a major semiconductor hub), and even Indian [11] attempts at design sovereignty. I can see a British-Japanese alignment around eventually merging Softbank properties like Arm, Graphcore, Ampere, and Rapidus into a British-Japanese version of Intel such that Graphcore+Ampere leverage Arm's ISA for HPC and Embedded/Telecom usecases respectively and Rapidus becomes their foundry. Additionally, I can see the Japanese government pushing it's players to heavily leverage Arm as well - especially given that all the major players in Japan already cooperate, have an ownership stake in, or are partially owned by Softbank. --- [0] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260213PD208/arm-risc-v-competition-chips-market.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260213PD208/arm-risc-v-com... [1] - https://www.cas.cn/cm/202601/t20260126_5097208.shtml https://www.cas.cn/cm/202601/t20260126_5097208.shtml [2] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260216VL205.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260216VL205.html [3] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2224839&reg=3&lang=2 https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleseDetailm.aspx?PRID=2224839&... [4] - https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1820621&reg=3&lang=2 https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1820621&re... [5] - https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806 https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806 [6] - https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acquires-ventana-micro-systems--deepening-risc-v-cpu-ex https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2025/12/qualcomm-acqu... [7] - https://idtalliance.org/ https://idtalliance.org/ [8] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250923VL201/renesas-3nm-revenue-automotive-chip-2030.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250923VL201/renesas-3nm-re... [9] - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovereign-ai-chip-design-industry-in-the-uk/council-for-science-and-technology-advice-on-building-a-sovereign-ai-chip-design-industry-in-the-uk https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/building-a-sovere... [10] - https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-malaysia-silicon-vision https://newsroom.arm.com/blog/arm-malaysia-silicon-vision [11] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250918VL202/arm-design-chips-2nm-renesas.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250918VL202/arm-design-chi...

3eb7988a1663 9mo ago
It is also a bad look when they sue Qualcomm for selling chips in a way that Arm does not like.
- wmf 9mo ago
  Qualcomm was trying to cheat Arm out of license fees that Nuvia agreed to.
  - johntb86 9mo ago
    Qualcomm won in court, so that doesn't seem to be the case.
    - kernal 9mo ago
      Yes, ARM did lose the case, but I attribute that to an ignorant judge as the license wasn’t transferable to Qualcomm from Nuvia. Regardless, ARM will have their day when it comes time to license the next ARM architecture version.
      - lugu 9mo ago
        Will they? What kind of breakthrough do you see coming that would convince large actors to make that switch?
      - adrian_b 9mo ago
        Qualcomm also had their own architectural license, but Arm claimed that neither of the 2 licenses is applicable. I have read at that time the documents presented by both parties, but essential details of the contracts were missing from the public documents, so it was impossible to know which of Qualcomm and Arm was right. Nevertheless, the argumentation presented by Qualcomm seemed far more plausible, unless it would have been contradicted by some of the redacted out contract details. Arm has not shown in public any information that could have proven that they are right, so they, or their supporters, may not say that the judge has made a wrong decision. Supposing that the decision was wrong, Arm has preferred to keep secret their arrangements with the customers, instead of proving that they were right, presumably because they might lose more money if other customers learned the exact details of the contract with Qualcomm, so they could request similar terms. While I believe that it is right for Qualcomm to have won the trial, I strongly dislike the fact that Qualcomm now designs their own cores instead of licensing them from Arm. The reason is that the Arm cores have excellent documentation, on par with that of the Intel-AMD CPUs, while the Qualcomm cores, like the Apple cores, have non-existent documentation. Moreover, Qualcomm is so silly that they have always obfuscated even what Arm cores they used in their older products. Whenever I evaluated some smartphone with Qualcomm SoC it was impossible to find any useful information on the Qualcomm site, but I had to go to various third parties to learn what is actually inside the Qualcomm SoC, to be able to compare it with alternatives.

djfergus 9mo ago

https://archive.is/wrKvv https://archive.is/wrKvv

Nevermark 9mo ago

I am curious how AMD sees themselves staying relevant in the value chain as compute is increasingly about cpu cores working with npu cores. Not all ARM use cases need that, but it would be a huge mistake to not develop integrated options. And also an opportunity to make adjustments to their business model.

wmf 9mo ago
AMD has CPU, GPU, NPU, FPGA, NIC, DPU... They seem well positioned. The Arm ecosystem has everything you could want but Arm themselves are taking some time to create their in-house CPU and TPU.
- Nevermark 9mo ago
  That's good news. A system for customers (and themselves) to conveniently tightly mix and match all those computing modes is a great competitive/value move.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
hulitu 9mo ago
ARM is an incompatible pile of mess. On an (X86) PC you can tranfer your disk, as it is, to a new X86 architecture and it will run. On ARM, every processor has its own bootloader, blobs needed for initialisation. Even the systems have different architecture. In the end, you need a special software setup, which is not supported more than a few years. See phones, Raspberry PIs and derivatives, Chromebooks.
- ajxs 9mo ago
  > On an (X86) PC you can tranfer your disk, as it is, to a new X86 architecture and it will run. This is because of a supporting set of standards (BIOS/UEFI/ACPI) that are well-supported on x86 systems, but technically independent of the x86 ISA. BIOS, and the general compatibility you're talking about, is a historical artefact of the IBM PC being so dominant in the market that other companies created compatible computers. UEFI and ACPI actually exist in the ARM ecosystem now. If ARM continues to grow outside of mobile devices, you could eventually see the kind of broad compatibility you're talking about. It's not super likely though. All signs point to the consumer computing ecosystem becoming more closed, rather than more open.

intrasight 9mo ago

>Yet Arm’s current model captures only a sliver of the value it creates. No, they capture exactly the value they create. As a long time (40 years) subscriber to The Economist, I expect better of them.

cyode 9mo ago
Do you really think it’s equal or are you contesting the value creation/capture dichotomy writ large?
- intrasight 9mo ago
  I think both Analogous to discussion 3 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994869#46995258 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46994869#46995258 We're fast approaching 1 trillion Arm CPUs manufactured - because it was a good design for a good price. No doubt unprecedented for something so complex to be produced in such volume. I predict that nothing else will ever achieve such scale.
  - OrvalWintermute 9mo ago
    The RISC-V growth is fairly spectacular; moving forward the CAGR is estimated at > 40%
nerdsniper 9mo ago
This feels like a religious belief. Somehow everyone captures exactly the value they create - no more, and no less. Amazing how perfect every transaction must be to ensure this is always true.
- concinds 9mo ago
  "Capturing the value you create" is a euphemistic way to describe pushing producer surplus towards 100% and consumer surplus to 0%, your ability to pull it off depends on your monopoly power, and it would be more honestly described as "value extraction" than as "capturing". I think in this case semantics matter.

ggm 9mo ago

Porque no los dos? Keep on doing IPR focussed design. Grow deeper roots into a foundry, work on integration of the tech into FPGA and big chip/platter stuff for AI. If AI tanks, the work will find a value point. We all want more memory and more execution cycles per clock tick be they on one ALU or many. Lots of work to come in optical related areas. ARM has green fields to dig, beyond the instruction set.

dingdongditchme 9mo ago
What do you mean by "IPR focussed design"? IPR = Intellectial Property Rights? So they should keep making designs but not compete with their customers?
- ggm 9mo ago
  Do both. It's not like other companies don't do the same, Microsoft sell surface as well as Windows. Samsung sell tech to Apple and compete with Apple.

jasoneckert 9mo ago

ARM's failed lawsuit with Qualcomm revealed these same ambitions, albeit in a much more negative light: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475228 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42475228 After following that drama, it's difficult to see ARM as anything but a greedy profiteer.

wyldfire 9mo ago
Maybe they're greedy or maybe they see the long game is that their architecture licensing business is in serious jeopardy from RISCV. So, if you can't beat em, join em. Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too.
- nxobject 9mo ago
  > Maybe they'll eventually make their own RV core designs too. I am not a deeply technical embedded person, but I actually don't think that would be the death of ARM: my understanding is that they develop a lot of SoC-level interconnect/fabric standards and IP as well. After all, you have to do a lot of work to integrate your ARM cores into an actual platform...
  - LeFantome 9mo ago
    The problem is they go from being at the center of everything outside x86-64 to just another RISC-V provider. And there will be dozens. And the market will not care so much as they succeed and fail as the ecosystem will not depend on the suppliers specifically. How does ARM stay at the top of that dog fight? It is a much bigger challenge than they have faced so far.
- LeFantome 9mo ago
  The problem for ARM is that there are a dozen RISC-V companies implementing their business model. You license ARM cores because you want a “custom” chip but do not want to start from scratch. You especially do not want to have to bootstrap a software ecosystem. When ARM had no competition, it is just a question of which ARM core you want. Now, you can get the same thing from any RISC-V design house. Which means having real choice over the features you want. If ARM is just one of those RISC-V shops, how does ARM compete? By being the best? Not likely. And, in the past, you could not totally outgrow ARM as they own the ISA. The Qualcomm lawsuit was an attempt to maintain tight control over this. With RISC-V, you can pack up and move your whole ecosystem elsewhere including taking it entirely in-house. This includes the ISA to an extent since anybody can add extensions. Today, we are seeing RISC-V succeed where this flexibility matters most: in microcontrollers and in AI. But as performance equalizes, volumes go up and costs come down, the use cases where ARM makes more sense dwindle. That makes backwards compatibility the last real reason to use ARM. But does this matter on mobile where devices download the apps that match their arch? Not really. Does it matter in most embedded cases? Not really. Does it even matter in the server? More, but even there not as much as it used to. Does it matter for anything mostly GPU or NPU driven? No. So that leaves desktop and laptop. And, outside of Apple, ARM has not really built up anything to stay compatible with. RISC-V may have time to grow into that niche before being blocked. We are going to exit 2026 with RISC-V chips that are fast enough. How fast will the costs come down? Perhaps a year or two? What markets is ARM well positioned to continue its dominance in?

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

umairnadeem123 9mo ago

[dead]

kernal 9mo ago

If ARM wanted a bigger cut then they should have been fabricating their designs years ago instead of licensing their IP. They would have owned the Android SoC market.

cududa 9mo ago

Good. It’s always insane to me that they get 1% of the iPhone CPU cost of ~$68 or something there around. There was a lawsuit in 2020 or 2021 where some evidence was unsealed showing ARM gets 1% of the CPU cost. I can’t recall how that CPU cost was calculated - but I believe that was a part of their deal through the early 30’s. That’s less than a dollar per iPhone.

faragon 9mo ago
It's "fair": ARM takes 1% of the iPhone CPU, i.e., less than 0.1% of the total phone price, while Apple takes 30% of the apps in the iStore
- hollerith 9mo ago
  --and about 50% of the total price of an iPhone.
  - vlovich123 9mo ago
    Yeah it’s like people don’t understand the concept of value addition. An ARM CPU by itself is worth less than what it is with the software, app ecosystem, dual sided market place Apple has built. While I think a 30% mark up is a tad expensive, it’s not hugely out of line with what retail store fronts generally charge to begin with. You can argue that virtual store fronts don’t have the same overheads, but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses.
    - Imustaskforhelp 9mo ago
      > but you’ve still got some physical servers to maintain and engineers to pay to keep it running daily vs a physical store front doesn’t have those challenges and expenses. are there any estimates on how much apple is costed in server costs because of apple app store and if there are, can that be considered with the 30% that they are leeching and compare the two of them and compare that estimate with the retail example you brought. So there are 2 million apps in app store. Assume average to be 100 MB so that is 2 million * 100 /(1024* 1024) = 190.734863 TB using $0.015 / GB-month Cf r2 with 0 egress costs I get the price as 2929.6128$ per month or 3 Grand/month ie. 36 Grand an year Heck, consider the average app size to be FOUR times the cost. Then you get the salary of 1 apple engineer and that's STILL less than the average salary of 1 apple engineer. https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Engineer-Salaries-E1138_D_KO6,14.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Apple-Engineer-Salaries-E11... And we are forgetting the 99$ something which apple app devs have to pay iirc at sometimes. I am an android guy and actually android has similar number of apps so the estimate is same actually. But I would assume that the engineers aren't the bottleneck either. I assume that both apple/android stores aren't so complex to build to deserve 30% of transaction. Some might be interesting about the malware/static-analysis but there was this hn post made recently about instagram blackhole which uncovered an malicious apple app which was available in app store so :/ The only reason one might think so is maybe considering the development cost of apple but I think that is an hardware decision and when we buy apple devices, it should be used to recoup the costs not trying to cash cow either. Its a trillion $ company trying to extract 3$ from a 10$ transaction you might do to anybody's patreon from the app :/ Yeah. TLDR: No. I don't think a 30% transaction is justified. Hope this helps.

OrvalWintermute 9mo ago

RISC-V could completely eat ARM for lunch if they try to jack up fees under the guise of "value extraction", and not through true value creation. In 2 years from this date, I fully expect the safety critical RISC-V chips like the forthcoming High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) from Microchip, Inc.[0], and derivatives [1] [2] leveraging SiFive IP[3], and other RISC-V competitors [4] to take a dominant position in Space, Aerospace, Aviation, and potentially other less cost-sensitive industries where RTOS dominate. This raises a few questions in my mind: Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases? Will we see more derivatives with even higher performance beyond the already announced PolarFire2 designed specifically for terrestrial use? I don't know how sensitive their overall BOMs are to high priced reliable chips designed for fault tolerance... I don't know how fast the quality of the mass market chinese RISC-V chips will ascend the perceived quality gap, and expand offerings into newer profiles [5] Where will the toolchain for RISC-V be on a specific chip basis? Is Nvidia likely to expand their usage of RISC-V? [0] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64-hpsc https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... [1] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64hx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... [2] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-bit-mpus/pic64gx https://www.microchip.com/en-us/products/microprocessors/64-... [3] https://www.sifive.com/ https://www.sifive.com/ [4] https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765 https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765 [5] https://docs.riscv.org/reference/profiles/rva23/_attachments/rva23-profile.pdf https://docs.riscv.org/reference/profiles/rva23/_attachments...

alephnerd 9mo ago
> In 2 years from this date, I fully expect the safety critical RISC-V chips like the forthcoming High Performance Spaceflight Computer (HPSC) from Microchip, Inc.[0], and derivatives [1] [2] leveraging SiFive IP[3], and other RISC-V competitors [4] to take a dominant position in Space, Aerospace, Aviation, and potentially other less cost-sensitive industries where RTOS dominate They already are in India [0][1], but SiFive helped build a portion of the ecosystem in India as well [2]. I'm sure there are similar applications in China but I'd need help pointing to a specific initiative. I know Tenstorrent is hitching their wagon to China especially after poaching Arm China leadership. > Could that extend to vehicles and other use-cases They already are in India [3][4][8] - this is something the US and Indian governments as well as American and Indian VCs and corporations are collaborating on together. One such collaboration has already IPOed [5], seen combat, and begun helping develop capacity within America [6]. And another has recently announced a mega-raise with General Catalyst [7]. RISC-V design is on the roadmap as well in this relationship. [0] - https://www.iitm.ac.in/happenings/press-releases-and-coverages/iit-madras-isro-jointly-developed-and-successfully-booted https://www.iitm.ac.in/happenings/press-releases-and-coverag... [1] - https://www.isro.gov.in/vikram3201.html https://www.isro.gov.in/vikram3201.html [2] - https://www.sifive.com/blog/sifive-expands-presence-in-india-to-keep-up-with-the https://www.sifive.com/blog/sifive-expands-presence-in-india... [3] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260209VL216/risc-v-automotive-commercial-adoption-industrial.html https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260209VL216/risc-v-automot... [4] - https://www.mindgrovetech.in/s2401-secure-iot https://www.mindgrovetech.in/s2401-secure-iot [5] - https://www.qualcommventures.com/insights/blog/ideaforge-from-iit-bombay-to-ipo/ https://www.qualcommventures.com/insights/blog/ideaforge-fro... [6] - https://firstbreach.com/news/first-breach-signs-jv-with-ideaforge-ranked-third-globally-to-manufacture-and-distribute-drones-in-the-u-s/ https://firstbreach.com/news/first-breach-signs-jv-with-idea... [7] - https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-investment-in-raphe-mphibr https://www.generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-investment-in-ra... [8] - https://incoresemi.com/ https://incoresemi.com/

christkv 9mo ago

Arm has two main incomes. Licensing the ISA of the processor (low value) and licensing pre designed cores (high value).

aurareturn 9mo ago

Arm's biggest customers are also their biggest competitors. Apple and Qualcomm use their ISA license instead of their Core architecture license. ISA license pays a much smaller royalty fee. Now that Apple and Qualcomm both design their own custom cores, Arm's custom core license business is suffering. The only other company that license their custom cores for phones is Mediatek. Arm still has hyperscalers in Google, AWS, Microsoft, and Meta for server core licenses though. But that might not last as long since everyone wants to differentiate and design their own cores. Apple and Qualcomm are succeeding in designing better custom cores than original Arm cores. So Arm's business model has to change if they want to survive. Either they make ISA license fees much higher (risk losing customers to RISCV) or they make their own CPUs and compete against their own customers even more. I enjoy analyzing chip companies and businesses. I've never invested in Arm's stock because their customers are also their competitors. Ultimately, the questions for Arm investors are: 1. Do you believe they can design better cores than Apple and Qualcomm (and other big tech)? 2. Do you think that the threat of companies moving to RISC-V is real if Arm raises ISA royalties?

RobotToaster 9mo ago
Risc-v seems to be rapidly filling in their moat. Very little software on android is written in assembly, and binary translation seems to be solved anyway.
- aurareturn 9mo ago
  Arguably, the LLM boom might be the best thing to happen to RISC-V. If software is cheap to produce, it'll be hardware cost that matter more. IE. Companies might say screw the royalty fees, we'll just ask an LLM to convert our software to run on RISC-V.
  - noodlesUK 9mo ago
    I think that for 95+% of companies that write software, it's not particularly sensitive to the ISA of the processor it's running on. Anyone who is writing code in a high level language like python or java doesn't care whether they're on x64, ARM or RISC-V. Compilers essentially already do this. There are specific situations (SIMD extensions, cryptography instructions, etc) where the differences sometimes get exposed, but it's pretty rare that this isn't abstracted away.

fifticon 9mo ago

traditionally, the chip goes on the shoulder, not the arm.

gzread 9mo ago

ARM almost made inroads on servers, then everyone switched back to x64. What happened?

Lucasoato 9mo ago
I regularly use Graviton CPUs on AWS (even if Amazon pays the cheaper ARM license), why would people switch back from that? It's effectively better in terms of performance/price, I expect these improvements to slowly but steadily reach the on-premises world as well.
- gzread 9mo ago
  Yeah, but everything on AWS is already way more expensive than it should be, so the slight discount on ARM instances is a gimmick from Amazon to diversify their servers or something. Actual ARM servers aren't cheaper or better.
justincormack 9mo ago
The latest figures sugegsted that about 50% of server shipments into the clouds now are Arm.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

erelong 9mo ago

Hopefully RISC-V pulls ahead in coming years and gets an even bigger "slice"

snvzz 9mo ago
RISC-V is rapidly growing the strongest ecosystem.
NoiseBert69 9mo ago
RISC-V is eating the "low power low performance"-niche alive right now. ARM-licensed microcontrollers (like STM32C0) cannot keep up with this price class. That's a huge business. Have a look at WCH. If you are used to the ST-HAL style you get that stuff running within a hour. They stuff works will fully opensourced compilers.

bacchusracine 9mo ago

Without Linux support, unlikely.

sylware 9mo ago

ARM should drop its ISAs and move to 'licensing' RISC-V implementations. IP-locked ISA is something nobody sane would want.

dingi 9mo ago

Not with this compatibility mess. I would trust ARM for a server/pc system, the day I can boot standard Debian Aarch64 image on them. Until then x86 it is.

josemanuel 9mo ago
https://www.minisforum.com/products/ms-r1 https://www.minisforum.com/products/ms-r1 Boots with uefi

kd913 9mo ago

ARM is a bloody financial hand grenade. 10% of the stock is floated. 90% of the stock is owned by Masa who used it for collateral for his 18 billion loan for Stargate. THat is against 33 banks who have a strong incentivise to dump in a margin call situation. Their revenues are circular for the last 4 years, with 30% growth purely coming from Softbank shuffling their own money. They are gonna be the canary in the coal mine for when the AI bubble implodes.

r4hamonrye 9mo ago

ARM .iso for x86-64 architecture renders this within compiling microcode in mockbuild before porting kernel tarball.